I gave a book talk Wednesday afternoon to a great group of folks at Amity Presbyterian Church here in Charlotte. During the Q&A, a woman talked about how she’d tried to lose weight but never could build any momentum to keep going. “How do you fight inertia?” she said.
I have a whole chapter about inertia in my book. It’s the hardest force to fight for most of us who are trying to change. Our bad habits are like gravity, pulling us back to the ground when we try to break free. I don’t have any easy answers. But I did tell the woman about the Seinfeld chain.
The story goes that a young comic once asked Jerry Seinfeld for advice on how to get better. Seinfeld said the key was writing jokes every day. He had come up with a simple system: He got a calendar, and every day he wrote, he put a big X through that day on the calendar. Once he strung together a few X’s, he had a chain. And then the goal every day was not to break the chain.
Seinfeld has kept the chain going since 1975.
There’s a documentary called “Jerry Before Seinfeld” that has a brilliant illustration of this. Seinfeld is sitting cross-legged in the middle of a street, surrounded by the pages of jokes he’s written for the past 40 years (he writes on a legal pad). The pages fill the whole block.
Three years ago, I gave up fast food for Lent. Before that I had been eating fast food nearly every day, sometimes two or three times a day, for 35 years. The first day I gave it up, I printed out a little one-page calendar and crossed off the date. That was a tough day. I really wanted some Wendy’s. Then I crossed off the next day. I wanted some McDonald’s. Then the third day and the fourth and the fifth. And with every passing day, I craved fast food a little less, and I wanted to keep the chain going a little more.
As of this morning, if I’ve done my math right, the chain is 1,296 days long.
I don’t even cross it off every day anymore — sometimes I’ll forget and have to go back and fill in a couple of weeks. But the chain is always there, in a slot on my desk where I can see it. It’s always in the back of my mind.
I’m healthier and happier and have more money in my pocket because of that chain. The brilliance of it is that it gave me a good habit to replace a bad one. And it was a painless way to build the inertia I needed.
It also couldn’t be cheaper. Find a calendar or print one out. Figure out something you want to do (or not do) every day. Start crossing out those boxes. Follow the chain and see where it takes you.
— TT